“Some days I feel like we’re running faster just to stand still,” Marc sighed as the espresso machine hissed in the corner of his boardroom.
“Revenue’s up. Margins? Not so much.”
If you lead a B2B company, you’ve probably felt that same tension.
You grow, hire more salespeople, win bigger logos—yet the bottom line refuses to follow.
More deals, more effort… not necessarily more profit.
What the Numbers Whispered
With Marc we started the way most leaders never quite dare: we laid everything bare.
No complex modelling—just spreadsheets, a whiteboard, and a few strong coffees.
Within an hour the pattern revealed itself.
- Roughly 20 % of the customers generated almost all the profit.
- A handful of “trophy accounts”—the ones that made for great slides in the sales deck—were quietly destroying margin.
- Product lines that everyone thought were heroes were, in reality, barely breaking even once the real cost of service was counted.
And here’s the uncomfortable part: Marc’s company isn’t unusual.
Across industrial and tech B2B businesses you see the same picture.
A small core of customers creates value, while the rest—especially the high-maintenance “strategic” ones—quietly erode it.
Lesson one: visibility beats volume.
Until you know the real cost to serve, “big customer” is just a flattering label.
From Insight to Playbook
Seeing the truth is one thing; acting on it is another.
Marc’s team needed a way to turn insight into habit.
They sketched a straightforward sales playbook—nothing heavy, just a living guide:
- who the ideal customers are,
- how to price for value,
- which red flags mean “walk away early.”
Then came the dashboards: a simple set of numbers that showed at a glance whether the pipeline was both healthy andprofitable.
They added a touch of automation and AI to take the grunt work out of reporting so salespeople could spend more time in real conversations.
The pattern?
Companies everywhere are investing in technology—CRM upgrades, new analytics tools—yet the real breakthrough isn’t the software itself.
It’s when technology frees humans to do the human part better: building trust, asking sharper questions, making better decisions.
Lesson two: technology should make the human part of sales stronger, not smaller.
Making Performance a Habit
But even the best ideas fade if you don’t hard-wire them.
That’s where most B2B teams stumble.
They launch a new process with a burst of enthusiasm; six months later the old habits quietly creep back.
To fight the drift, Marc’s company built a steady rhythm:
weekly pipeline reviews, monthly leadership huddles, quarterly “how are we really doing?” sessions.
Managers and reps practised the playbook on live opportunities, testing small pricing tweaks in real deals and refining them based on what actually worked.
They also learned to separate results—the revenue and margin you report—from performance—the repeatable behaviours and systems that make those numbers inevitable.
This isn’t just Marc’s challenge; it’s the quiet problem across countless B2B firms.
Growth slows not because people don’t know what to do, but because they can’t keep doing the simple, obvious things once the daily rush takes over.
Lesson three: good results are the by-product of consistent performance.
The Takeaway
Marc’s story is personal, but the pattern is universal.
Behind every B2B company wrestling with thin margins is the same truth:
The solution isn’t a silver bullet. It’s doing the awfully simple things—customer by customer, week after week—without ever letting them slide.
Consistently simple beats occasionally brilliant.
That’s how profit and people finally shake hands.
Learning for Performance 